Electronic systems and circuits are often utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as computers, video equipment, and communication systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating information in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Frequently, these activities involve vast amounts of information and significant resources are expended developing the information. Complex systems and vast amounts of information often result in greater susceptibility to disastrous information corruption and loss. Maintaining accurate replicated images of the information for is often very important for a variety or reasons (e.g., disaster recovery, corruption correction, etc.).
Maintaining large duplicate storage images is usually very resource intensive. Approaches that completely copy an entire storage image can result in significant delays and impacts on system processing and communication networks. While some traditional replication approaches are implemented at a block level, the entire complete volume is still copied and/or analyzed. Some conventional approaches perform a full synchronization and copy of information in each and every block in a volume. Other systems perform a differential analysis in which information in each and every block in volume is analyzed to determine if there is a difference and those that are different are copy. Approaches that copy and/or analyze information in each and every block in a volume consume significant storage, processing and communication resources.